The past few days there has been posts raging on blogs regarding Payperpost and the issue of disclosure. While technically not a blog, Steve’s Digicam’s is a heavy traffic, blog like web site that reviews new digital cameras as they come to market. The site has no disclosure at all on what happens to the cameras after they are reviewed. Personally, I could care less whether Steve returns the cameras, keeps them until they fill every room in his house, sells them on Ebay or gives them away after he reviews them. Why? Steve provides a valuable service via a disciplined process that he follows with each camera. The site is so successful in fact that Steve’s Digicams is imitated and scraped in countless splogs that you can find on blog search engines
Steve’s Digicams includes high quality, expensive to serve test photos, most painstakingly taken from the exact same location and lighting conditions so that site visitors can make their own decisions and judgments on quality before purchasing a camera thanks to the site. The service he provides is invaluable, I couldn’t imagine buying a new digital camera without visiting the site. But the site has no disclosure. If what the disclosure crowd says is indeed correct, this site most certainly should have been rejected by the public for the non-disclosure in regards to the cameras, right? Then why is it a popular (Alexa ~4,000) site still running strong 8 years later? When it’s a source you trust that provides consistent value to you, disclosure is a non-issue.
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One more prop to Steve’s Digicams, they understand their visitors and they value highly that each site visitor has a smooth user experience on each visit and they focus on visitor retention – as stated on their about page:
“Steve’s Digicams was created in early 1997 and since then we have often considered making major site changes to make it “flashier” — we have opted not to do this in an effort to keep our site accessible to everyone. It’s nice to visit sites with tons of fancy graphics and lots of WOW factor, but many times those sites do not load properly or they take a long time to load due to net congestion. We also realize that not everyone has DSL or cable modem access to the net, many are still using 28.8 or 56K dial-up modems. We write our code in a manner so that our pages load as quickly as possible and, for the most part, you can find what you are looking for within 2 clicks. We know many people bookmark pages on our site, so for that reason we do not remove any items which we have previously posted nor change their URLs.”